Noob questions - Setup

This is a discussion on Noob questions - Setup ; Last time I tried Linux was back in the Win95 days. I'm now looking to
get a new machine and actually comparing OS X, Vista, and [a little
surprisingly to myself] Linux. I've gotten a copy of SuSE to test ...

Noob questions

Last time I tried Linux was back in the Win95 days. I'm now looking to
get a new machine and actually comparing OS X, Vista, and [a little
surprisingly to myself] Linux. I've gotten a copy of SuSE to test on
my Laptop and everything has been going quite well, in fact.

Hopefully no one minds some silly questions to help me make a
decision...

During the SuSE installation, the partitioning was extremely tricky.
Back in the day I knew my way around fdisk quite well, but there was a
lot here that was new (LVM, etc). I still don't know all the new lingo
and acronyms. But, anyway, here's a few questions about the
partitioning:

- I actually had a few troubles getting it to recognize the hard disk
after the partitioning happened (I was trying to keep my XP partition
in place). I'd have to reboot and try again, but instead of having
sda1, sda2, sda3, now it was sda4, sda5, sda6, etc. This happened a
few times where the partition numbers just kept growing. I didn't know
if this was alright or if old partitions (with what would become
wasted spaces) were still floating around? Eventually I think I got it
all worked out, but I still don't have sda's 2-5. Is this a problem
and something I can fix?

- Also, is there a reason that /home is partitioned out separate
from /? In my trials of seeing what I could get working with Linux, I
wanted to try the Cedega program with a few test apps. It was quite
obnoxious when I was accidently running it as root and ran out of disk
space on / installing an app when I had 20 gigs free in /home.
Obviously I was able to fix the problem, but it wouldn't have been a
problem if there was only / and the swap partition. Is there a way to
fix this w/o reinstalling or is it like that for a reason?

- Back to Cedega for a moment (perhaps this is better asked on their
forums or Wine's?), is there a way of making it so that an installed
app is available to all users and not just the one that installed it?

Let me say for a moment that some awesome strides have been made by
the Linux developers over the past 10 years or so. RPMs and YaST is
very nice. Perhaps YaST is just for SuSE, but regardless, it is very
nice and handy. Easy to install packages and manage them.

The next set of questions is pretty much all about development. I'm a
programmer, and so development tools are up quite high on my
requirements list.

- Last time I was using Linux it was pretty much gcc, make, and trying
to figure out GUI programming with X. Is there much that's different
today? Are there any nice IDEs for Linux outside of Emacs (yes, I've
been in Win32 land for too long)? I have no idea if CodeWarrior or
similar works on Linux. I've seen Eclipse, but actually don't know too
much about it.

- It took a while, but I was able to get glx working in X. If anyone
can make strides helping that process out, man, for someone long past
the point of caring about rpm -wtfomg, that would be very nice to just
work out of the box. But, assuming it would normally, given that I'm
buying a new machine, are there certain video cards that I should keep
in mind (or stay away from)? Any limitations or some-such I should be
aware of?

Finally, I'm generally curious how the community feels about SuSE vs.
the other distros. I admit, I solely picked SuSE based on it being
backed by Novell. But there's also Ubuntu, RedHat, etc. Are they
pretty much all the same thing or are there major differences I should
be aware of? Are any of them better supported or have a better
knowledge base to draw from? What about the installation process and
getting 3D acceleration working out of the box?

Thanks for taking the time to read and answer these questions, folks!
Keep up the great work!

Jeff M.

Re: Noob questions

On Apr 16, 3:50 pm, "Jeff M." wrote:
> Last time I tried Linux was back in the Win95 days. I'm now looking to
> get a new machine and actually comparing OS X, Vista, and [a little
> surprisingly to myself] Linux. I've gotten a copy of SuSE to test on
> my Laptop and everything has been going quite well, in fact.
>
> Hopefully no one minds some silly questions to help me make a
> decision...
>
> During the SuSE installation, the partitioning was extremely tricky.
> Back in the day I knew my way around fdisk quite well, but there was a
> lot here that was new (LVM, etc). I still don't know all the new lingo
> and acronyms. But, anyway, here's a few questions about the
> partitioning:
>
> - I actually had a few troubles getting it to recognize the hard disk
> after the partitioning happened (I was trying to keep my XP partition
> in place). I'd have to reboot and try again, but instead of having
> sda1, sda2, sda3, now it was sda4, sda5, sda6, etc. This happened a
> few times where the partition numbers just kept growing. I didn't know
> if this was alright or if old partitions (with what would become
> wasted spaces) were still floating around? Eventually I think I got it
> all worked out, but I still don't have sda's 2-5. Is this a problem
> and something I can fix?
>
> - Also, is there a reason that /home is partitioned out separate
> from /? In my trials of seeing what I could get working with Linux, I
> wanted to try the Cedega program with a few test apps. It was quite
> obnoxious when I was accidently running it as root and ran out of disk
> space on / installing an app when I had 20 gigs free in /home.
> Obviously I was able to fix the problem, but it wouldn't have been a
> problem if there was only / and the swap partition. Is there a way to
> fix this w/o reinstalling or is it like that for a reason?
>
> - Back to Cedega for a moment (perhaps this is better asked on their
> forums or Wine's?), is there a way of making it so that an installed
> app is available to all users and not just the one that installed it?
>
> Let me say for a moment that some awesome strides have been made by
> the Linux developers over the past 10 years or so. RPMs and YaST is
> very nice. Perhaps YaST is just for SuSE, but regardless, it is very
> nice and handy. Easy to install packages and manage them.
>
> The next set of questions is pretty much all about development. I'm a
> programmer, and so development tools are up quite high on my
> requirements list.
>
> - Last time I was using Linux it was pretty much gcc, make, and trying
> to figure out GUI programming with X. Is there much that's different
> today? Are there any nice IDEs for Linux outside of Emacs (yes, I've
> been in Win32 land for too long)? I have no idea if CodeWarrior or
> similar works on Linux. I've seen Eclipse, but actually don't know too
> much about it.
>
> - It took a while, but I was able to get glx working in X. If anyone
> can make strides helping that process out, man, for someone long past
> the point of caring about rpm -wtfomg, that would be very nice to just
> work out of the box. But, assuming it would normally, given that I'm
> buying a new machine, are there certain video cards that I should keep
> in mind (or stay away from)? Any limitations or some-such I should be
> aware of?
>
> Finally, I'm generally curious how the community feels about SuSE vs.
> the other distros. I admit, I solely picked SuSE based on it being
> backed by Novell. But there's also Ubuntu, RedHat, etc. Are they
> pretty much all the same thing or are there major differences I should
> be aware of? Are any of them better supported or have a better
> knowledge base to draw from? What about the installation process and
> getting 3D acceleration working out of the box?
>
> Thanks for taking the time to read and answer these questions, folks!
> Keep up the great work!
>
> Jeff M.

To answer a few of your questions:

I do believe that the best Linux compatible graphics cards are
Nvidia. In partitioning usually by default the Linux distribution
will use the free space on the disk if not told otherwise, usually by
clicking a different option. Typically the reason /home is separated
from / is so that if you have to reinstall or if you want to try a
different distribution you can just reformat and reinstall to the /
partition and leave the /home partition alone.

Personally, I like Ubuntu or Fedora Core, Ubuntu 7.04 which rolls out
Thursday has some nice features and is very easy to install and use.
In Ubuntu you can either use synaptic (graphical package manger), apt-
get or aptitude (from command line) to install programs. Also you can
install a program inside of Ubuntu by going to Add/Remove... and
selecting a specific program. Ubuntu 7.04 has a feature that allows
you to select the proprietary or restricted driver.

Fedora Core has similar tools as well like yum on the command line and
a similar graphical install similar to Ubuntu. Both installations are
fairly straight forward. Ubuntu usually comes as a Live Cd which
allows you to see if certain things work before you install. Then
when you want to install just click install on the Desktop of the Live
Cd. Fedora Core 6 has a similar install to SuSe, however, I find it
easier.